México Bárbaro

No pun intended - this is a collection of short movies. And one that is ... well fantastical. Much of this is not really on the realistic side of things. Still it has themes that some people may feel a connection too. Or even some cliches (drugs and prostitution to name but two). As you can tell already, you can not be squeamish or sensitive. Well you can of course, but you can't be that and watch this and hope for the best or whatever.

The quality of the shorts is all over the place, as is the quality of the picture. Though technically speaking (also no pun intended) it is meant to look certain ways ... for certain short movies. Or segments, since this is one after the other ... with no apparent connection ... but that should not matter ... not seen the "sequel" yet, but I assume they had a bit more money ... will watch when I find it on a streaming service ... sooner or later ... the cover/poster is amazing too.

Normally, this type of movie would be just up my street but Mexico Barbaro is terrible. It starts off promising but the stories are short, violent, and ultimately either uninteresting or stupid. Such a wasted opportunity.

There are 2 decent stories but the rest are unrealized and foolish. I wish they had fleshed out some of the stories and cut the rest!

Here are seven horror shorts that lack horror, premise, dialogue, even sound at times. The whole collection is completely uninspired, the stories are poorly developed and executed.

While photography may rescue part of some of these shorts, some just come short of everything, just like high school projects. Harsh? Maybe. True? Completely. Take for instance "La Cosa Más Preciada (The Most Precious Thing), the acting is bad, the dialogues are hands down some of the worst I've ever heard in cinema history, the whole thing was given an instagram-like "vintage" filter. This one in particular is preposterous.

The rest of the shorts, whilst more professional, are still pretty bad and absurd, there is no heart to be found. If the project was done by amateur kids, then fine, I'd give it 4 stars, but these are - self?- deemed- directors.

Also, the only Mexican thing on this are the assets (directors, actors, writers, producers, settings), there are no real legends or myths in here, just perhaps loosely 'inspired from'.

My conclusion is that a couple of Mexican rejects from 'ABC's of Death' decided to take matters in their own hands... disaster ensued of course.

I must say I was very excited to watch this since I first heard of the project back in early 2014. I was looking forward to what 'indie' Mexican directors had up their sleeve since we practically have no recognized mainstream horror directors, but no, I cannot vouch for any of them.

I loved all the films, and each offers something a little different than the last. I'm looking forward to researching the directors involved and finding more of their works.

The quality of most of these shorts is actually pretty good in terms of camera-work and cinematography. The quality of the acting ios decent too, mostly. There's really nothing to earn a low rating on those grounds. If these are representative of current Mexican cinema, they're actually pretty good exemplars to praise.

Now...the stories and approaches to horror...well, that's another issue. A couple of them weren't bad, primarily the 2nd one, set in a haunted hacienda. But somewhere along the line, Mexican horror filmmaking seems to have equated horror with disgusting and off-putting. And that's a huge problem. When you leave your audience more queasy than scared, you've failed at horror. There;s a reason the genre is called 'horror movies' rather than 'disgusting movies'. Your core audience might be somewhat jaded to gore, but that's not really the reason why (most of them) watch.

Just on filmmaking grounds alone, there's a lot of promise for Mexican cinema on display here. If these filmmakers manage to substitute real horror for excessive viscera, I'd certainly love to watch what they put out.

(Also, several of them drag out shots and scenes for far too long. But that's an easily correctable issue.)